Urban Geomorphs for Cyberpunk Games

Null.hack is a cyberpunk RPG that I’ve been working on. You play as a character in a Robocop, Akira, Blade Runner, Neuromancer type world - and less so with the Shadowrun stuff. I’ll write more about it later.

To me, more important that the mechanics of a game is the library content - or the GM tools. The mechanics are important for sure, without them there’s no game. But what makes something like a rulebook useful, is how easily it makes it for the GM to run that game - to create adventures, compelling situations, that sort of thing. So that’s what’s been taking up a lot of my time on Null.hack, creating useful tools for running a Cyberpunk game.

An Urban Geomorph for Nullhack. Just slice this badboy up, twist and turn it and duplicate it until you have a city of big enough size for your game.

So these are basically twelve tiles that you can cut twist, rotate, and duplicate to make a big-ass city for your players to explore. Here’s a few examples of what you can make with them. Here’s the high res file.

This one only uses a few of the tiles, which ends up looking repeated - but sometimes that can be cool and add a little design to the city.

So even with just a few twists and turns you can see that you have a pretty decent area for playing in. A huge area honestly, probably more than anyone could get adventure out of. But in cyberpunk games the whole city is supposed to be at your disposal. Travel is supposed to be easy. Or if its not easy, then its taking place on a scale entirely different than this. Like, running around in Blade Runner seems hard, there’s crowds, its raining, replicants are trying to kill you/survive. But then every now and then Deckard hops into a spinner and flies over to the Tyrell building. These geomorphs are more for the latter situation.

This one uses the full set of tiles a few times creating what I would call a whole district of a Megacity.

I think of the thick black lines as like major roads or highways - but sometimes they end up looking more like the edges of major buildings.

And even when you blow up to basically a city size you can start to lay out districts or faction control. You can mark off where the players have been. Or you can just die drop onto the table to find out where important POIs are. In this case I set different encounter tables for each district. I’d lay in colors for different gangs or corporation or riot mob or private cop controlled territory and then I’d have the borders shift every so often as a result of their wars.

Hopefully you can get some quick mileage out of this. Overlaying a grid for cell reference, like A1, B2, C3 would make it pretty easy to track important locations.

Let me know if this is helpful or if you end up using it in any of your games!